Sunday, November 04, 2012

With two days to go TC still sees victory ahead for Barack Obama. I do follow Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog on the New York Times site but, if anything, I pay more attention to Mark Blumenthal's Pollster.com site on the Huffington Post. Like Silver, Blumenthal started his site independently as Mystery Pollster, but had it taken over by a larger institution. He is a former Democratic Pollster and his model was created by him and Stanford political scientist Simon Jackman.

Pollster.com currently projects Obama to win 277 electoral votes to Romney's 206 with four states still too close to call - Florida, Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire. My own projected map created with Pollster.com's do-it-yourself electoral map agrees with the Pollster.com, but I expect Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia to be won by Obama. I still see Florida as too close to call.

The closing national polls show a closing tick to Obama, and as you can see on this Nate Silver post, almost all of the recent swing state polls are going Obama's way albeit narrowly.

Here is the Pollster.com current national polling average (I customized it to date from September 1 to present)

Let me finish with a note of caution. On election night it is likely when the vote count finishes for the evening, whether or not enough states have yet been decided to conclude the contest, it is likely Romney will lead in the national vote count. This is the message of TNR blogger Nate Cohn who says:

If Obama ultimately wins the popular vote by a narrow margin, as
suggested by the current average of national polls, Obama won’t lead the
popular vote on Election Night and might not for weeks.

With the West Coast providing the margin of victory for any
Democratic candidate in a close election, Republican presidential
candidates outperform their eventual share of the popular vote until the
West Coast reports its results. In 2008, California, Washington, and
Oregon voted for Obama by a 4 million-vote margin, representing nearly
half of his national popular vote victory.

But the time zones are not alone in delaying results from Washington,
Oregon, and California. In most eastern states, the overwhelming
majority of votes are counted by the end of Election Night, since only a
small share of absentee or overseas ballots arrive after the election.
But elections in Washington and Oregon are now conducted entirely by
mail and 41 percent of California voters voted by mail in 2008. In some
states, ballots only need to be postmarked by Election Day and it can
take days before all of the votes arrive and weeks before they get
counted, usually in modest batches once or twice a day..

On the results for Senate and House of Representatives I still see a Democratic Senate and Republican House. Although I am marginally more optimistic about potential Democratic gains in the latter the Republicans will retain a comfortable majority for the next two years.